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I want to preface this review by saying that the factor that most of the negative reviews I've seen have cited wasn't an issue for me. I was not bothered by the excessive gore, although I did think it was just that: excessive. Why would I bother to complain about that when there are so many larger problems? Frankly, the first part would have been where I stopped reading if this hadn't been a class assignment. The huge amount of time that the narrator spent defending zoos was my first indication that this wasn't going to be a fun read. It's not a matter of a difference of opinion -- I agree with him, actually -- but the tone was so ridiculously defensive and condescending that it was difficult to read. Martel was obviously expecting people to disagree with him and felt the need to cut dissenters off before they could argue. The end result sounds like a speech one might expect to hear at a formal debate, only with less respect for the listeners' intelligence. The book just falls apart further from there. While Pi's resourcefulness in his attempts to survive provided some interesting moments of ingenuity, they didn't serve to lighten the tedium the rest of the story fell into. Yes, I imagine it is pretty boring being trapped on a lifeboat for so long, but deliberately mimicking that doesn't inspire any sympathy in the reader. The island highlights the book's greatest failure: it tries to be absurdist in an effort to become allegorical, but never quite makes it. It cannot accept its own internal logic, and constantly makes self-references to how odd and strange everything is. The end result is not unlike a teenager shouting, "Look at me! I'm a rebel! I don't care what anyone thinks! Aren't I great?!" But, as other reviews have noted, it's at the end that the book truly falls apart. Pi denies the whole story he's already told us in order to point out that stories are important, because everything is in how we perceive it and nothing is really real until we say it is. If the book had actually gotten to the absurdist level it so desperately strove for, this might have worked. As it stands, the "moral" boils down to nothing more insightful than, "Dude, what if the whole world was, like, really a computer program?" Yes, that's how dramatically this book fails: I watched "The Matrix" purely for the oooh-pretty special effects, and I can make a better argument for it as a philosophical masterpiece than "Life of Pi."